To be honest, $18m for Psychonauts 2 does seem high unless they are moving away from the old graphics style and going with a full 3D engine. Don't know why they'd do that, though. Just use a modern version of the old engine.

Psychonauts WAS fully 3d and $18m is not as much as you would think Considering a low wage for someone in the games industry is $50,000 and you would want a dev time of 2-3 years that's at least $150,000 per person. Double fines simple kickstarter adventure game got over $3 million dollars and they are struggling with that budget.

$25m is the price to make a AAA game like CoD today. The majority of the rest of the money is solely in advertising. That's with hundreds of people working each year to make the games. Most games don't cost more than $10m to make today.

Even if you paid everyone $50,000 per year for a standard 40 person crew to make the game, it would allow for 9 years of development. A figure that's very far fetched. Sorry, that number is very high for the type of game it is.

Ratchet & Clank games don't cost that much to make, for example.

As I said, people making similar games today do it for less than $5m. I believe what they wanted to do is taking it much further than it was and use current (or possibly even next-gen) technology.

50 grand? What, is Double Fine made up entirely of QA testers? Entry personnel make $60+ and the average is over 70K.

Double Fine has about 65 people. 65 times 70,000 average times 2 years....Over $9 million without marketing or anything.

So....

@Korda You aren't wrong that 18 million would be a fair number *IF* Double Fine were to go all the way with development and make a big AAA game with lots of marketing. But Double Fine is a lot more "indie" than that.

@cgoodno "people making similar games today do it for less than $5m" Sure, but with lower production values and smaller teams.